F 16

ARTICLES ABOUT F 16 BY DATE - PAGE 4

By Raheem Salman BAGHDAD, April 29 (Reuters) - Iraq will receive the first 24 of 36 F-16 fighter jets it has ordered from the United States at the beginning of 2014, a senior official told Reuters on Sunday. Under deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq's air force was one of the largest in the region with hundreds of mainly Soviet-designed jets. Its military was disbanded after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Last July, Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki doubled the number of warplanes Iraq had initially planned to buy to strengthen an air force neglected during a protracted period when the country relied on U.S. air support..

A 75-year-old northwest suburban woman flying her kit plane entered restricted airspace during a presidential visit to Chicago and was intercepted by two F-16 fighter jets, authorities said. The fighter jets intercepted a Kitfox Model 2 aircraft when it violated a temporary airspace restriction Wednesday evening in Chicago, said Lt. Col. Mike Humphreys, of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Humphreys said the military planes escorted the small aircraft back to its home airport at Mill Rose Farm in Barrington.

An F-16 fighter jet was damaged when it overshot a runway at an air show in Oshkosh, Wis. The jet came to rest nose-down into the grass, officials said. The pilot was not injured, but the plane's nose gear collapsed and the nose cone was cracked, officials said. A cause of the mishap has not been determined. The incident occurred Thursday at the Experimental Aircraft Association's AirVenture in Oshkosh. The jet was landing on a runway at Wittman Regional Airport. Bill Tregoning, of Tonica, Ill., told the Appleton Post-Crescent that "it looked like the plane came off the edge of the runway going about 60 miles per hour.

Israelis witnessed the second chapter of a riveting tragedy Sunday when the crash of an F-16 fighter-bomber killed the pilot son of Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who died in the Columbia space shuttle disaster of 2003. Radio and television stations interrupted their programming to report the death of air force Lt. Assaf Ramon, 21, and convey emotional responses by the nation's leaders. Some newscasters wore black. "There are few moments in which personal pain rips so powerfully through the nation's heart," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said from Cairo.

An airliner and its fighter jet escort swooped low over New York on Monday as part of a government photo-op, panicking workers and forcing evacuations. Mayor Michael Bloomberg (left) said he was "furious" he wasn't notified and that he would have tried to stop it. Read more at chicagotribune.com/plane

BOMBS AWAY: An Air National Guard jet mistakenly dropped a 22-pound, non-explosive practice bomb on an apartment complex in Tulsa. No one was injured, police said Friday. ROBOT'S POWERLESS: The International Space Station's new robot remained without power Friday because of a cable design flaw. Experts devised yet another plan to get electricity flowing to the machine. F-16 CRASHES: An F-16 fighter out of Luke Air Force Base crashed Friday near Phoenix, Air Force officials said.

Taliban militants attacked a southern town Thursday in the latest violence in Afghanistan, sparking intense fighting that left two insurgents dead, the Defense Ministry said. A NATO air strike pushed back the militants, who used mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns in the attack on Naw Zad, in volatile Helmand province, said Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Zahir Azimi. He said the fighting was "intense." A Dutch F-16 fighter jet crashed in Ghazni province in central Afghanistan, killing the pilot, military officials said.

President Hugo Chavez said Venezuela will buy 24 Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jets this year, and his government will build a factory to produce Kalashnikov assault rifles. Chavez said Wednesday that the SU-30 jets will replace a fleet of U.S.-made F-16s, which he says Venezuela has had trouble maintaining because the United States has refused to sell his government upgrades. "First we are going to buy 24 Sukhoi S-30s, and we are going to leave open the possibility of a future acquisition" of Sukhoi S-35s, Chavez said in a speech.